Funded by
Crisis and Support Centre of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs
In 2022 and 2023, Ukrainian and international actors made considerable efforts to deal with the terrible situation caused by Russian bombing of energy infrastructures and to reduce the impact of energy cuts on the population.
All the actors targeted the needs of individuals and key facilities, such as hospitals and social institutions, while activities in non-traditional sectors were of varying quality. In order to go beyond the provision of traditional winterisation products and strategically address the issue of energy, it would probably have been necessary to devise a mechanism external to the UN Cluster system, which is what many initiatives linked to Ukrainian NGOs, local authorities and the diaspora did. Although the mass delivery, for example, of generators was a decisive factor in the “winter battle”, it also revealed a number of “areas for improvement” in terms of technical aspects (choice of models), organisational aspects (maintenance, repairs), economic aspects (where to find the money to run the generator?) and, more generally, coordination within the “energy” sector.
The evaluation analysed all these points in order to help plan operations for the 2023-2024 winter season.
The recommendations focus on several areas:
- Protecting facilities and people;
- Storing energy, fuel and equipment, particularly in relation to contingency plans;
- Maintaining the facilities;
- Having the capacity to do repairs;
- Reducing risk and vulnerability;
- Developing mechanisms and capacities to replace what can not be repaired.
This mission covered a large part of the country: the Oblasts of Kharkiv and Chernihiv, the Oujhorod region, the city of Odessa, the Oblasts of Mykolaev, Kherson, Kropyvnytskyï, and Dnipro, and the areas of Pavlograd, Zaporijjia and Nikopol.
Carried out by
